Remember how Mark Shuttleworth justified moving the window titlebar widgets to the left by claiming the space freed up on the right side could now be used for something else? On his blog, Shuttleworth unveiled what, exactly, Ubuntu's plans are: window indicators, or 'windicators'. In a nutshell, it comes down to having a tray area in every window.

"Use icons instead of text labels: Great as long as you don't have any verbs in your program for which there's no universally agreed-upon image."

Yeah, this is a horrible idea. I've actually gone exactly the other way, ever since someone put a neat blog post on planet GNOME a few years back which illustrated the possibility - disable icons entirely and _only_ use text labels. It makes rendering interfaces faster, and it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to remember that $RANDOM_DEVELOPER's vaguely dodo-looking hieroglyph actually means 'premuntificate' or whatever.